Coca Cola’s AI-made holiday ad may be merry, but it’s not too bright.
This week, the soda giant unveiled three ads as part of its 2025 holiday campaign.
But eagle-eyed viewers quickly noticed that one of them — an AI-generated remake of its iconic 1995 Holidays Are Coming commercial — was riddled with glitches.
If you look closely, you’ll see that the iconic bright red Coca-Cola trucks appear to change shape as they cruise down the snowy street. The trucks also seem to gain or lose wheels form one shot to the next.
Coca-Cola’s unsteady Christmas trucks illustrate a major limitation of generative video models. These systems often fail to keep characters and objects consistent across multiple shots.
Because many AI models build videos frame by frame without remembering previous scenes, they often suffer from what experts call ‘temporal drift’ — the slow breakdown of continuity across frames.
Some newer systems claim to have solved the issue, but Coca-Cola’s ad shows that the technology still isn’t quite ready for the big leagues.
‘There will be people who criticize — we cannot keep everyone 100 percent happy,’ Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s global VP and head of generative AI, said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter this week. ‘But if the majority of consumers see it in a positive way, it’s worth going forward.’
Indeed, there were people who criticized. Viewers rushed to the comments of the YouTube video to share their thoughts on the ad.
‘I really miss pre-AI internet,’ reads one comment under the YouTube video.
Another said, ‘real magic is when you hire an actual artist with a soul.’
‘I’ve never wanted a Pepsi so badly in my entire life,’ someone else joked.
‘Ah yes the holiday spirit of firing your employees to produce AI slop,’ one user wrote.
Coca-Cola announced plans to close down five production and distribution sites across the US in July — a plan that would cause 900 workers to lose their jobs, marking one of the company’s largest waves of domestic layoffs in recent decades.
The shutdowns were to affect sites in California, Florida, and Massachusetts, ranging from long-established bottling plants to regional distribution centers.
According to the company, each closure reflects a larger strategy focused on streamlining operations, increasing automation, and outsourcing segments of its supply chain to third-party bottlers.
Automation played a role in the layoffs, as did tariffs — especially on aluminum, which has pushed up the cost of cans.
Coca-Cola faces the 25 percent tariff imposed by President Donald Trump on aluminum imports in March, as the company imports some of the aluminum used for its soda cans from Canada.
However, Coca-Cola fared better than its number one rival Pepsi because it used ingredients used in US facilities.
Pepsi decided to make most of its concentrate — the sugary recipes that are then combined with water, bubbles and sweetener to make soda — in Ireland due to its low tax rate.
‘Ireland has long had the tax advantage—until the tariffs hit,’ HSBC analyst Carlos Laboy told the Wall Street Journal.
